Chapter 24

“I met this strange person, on my way to this floor of the dungeon.” Michael began, only to be interrupted by the king.

“More nonsense. We are not trapped here by some malignant entity. We chose to live here…” he looked around, confused, as if stunned for a moment. “…a long time ago. Yes, a long time ago.”

Interesting. “I see,” Michael said, an idea forming in his mind, “and where do you come from, originally?”

Almost there. “We come from the land…” the king paused, confused again.

…and now!

Michael strained. He crammed all the mana he could into his new skill, burning coins to the point his newly made network was a blaze of pain inside his body. Then some more, feeling his body start to break apart from the strain, crouching down and then releasing all the bottled power. His shoes exploded, and his jeans were torn by the force he released, denting the wood beneath his feet.

The force was so great that he was upon the king before the great tree-kin could even recover from his dungeon-induced daze. Michael hit him in the chest with a fist, wreathed in the hottest flame he could conjure, coins turning to dust and mana inside his pocket. Then, still holding a handful of coins, he slammed his other hand in the king’s face, burning his mossy beard and obscuring his vision.

The hand on the king’s chest started pounding at the wood, the bones in the hand breaking, then shattering the arm and fingers while [Healing Aura] worked overtime to fix the damage Michael was causing to himself. The king had shaken off his daze, and was howling in pain, thrashing about with his long arms. Michael was hugging his body, out of reach of the blinded raging creature. But even as it thrashed mindlessly, stray hits carved at Michael’s back, breaking bones and tearing off chunks of flesh.

He kept pushing, desperately trying to pierce the impossibly hard bark of the monster. His hand was pulverized, but it didn’t matter because a ball of flame surrounding it, burning white-hot. The bark was charring, but it was slow, too slow. The king slapped away the hand on its face, snapping the bone in many places. He couldn’t see yet with his face on fire, but the fire was rapidly diminishing. Michael ignored the pain and thrust his hand in his pocket, burning all the remaining coins.

This is no time for caution. He kept his gaze on the king, pounding at his chest. Now and again, he managed to deflect a strike with his [Distortion Field] but he was too close to properly see. He felt his legs go numb, a hit severing his spine.

It’s over. He thought, slumping to the ground.

But before he was out of range, out of rage and desperation, he threw one last punch at the monster’s chest. Mana surged within, overloading his crude network to the extreme, as Michael put his all being into one, last, desperate attempt.

The punch connected. Michael felt something give. There was the sound of wood shattering, and the broken, flaming fist continued on for several more inches than planned. It embedded itself inside the king’s chest, which was hollow, fire still raging, carving an ever-bigger hole.

There was no heart, no weak organs to target. Just a small hollow space, too small to even summon a distortion bubble. Michael was hanging by the embedded limb, even as the king howled in fury and tried to dismember him. He felt his elbow twist the wrong way, and he screamed in pain, but refused to let go.

Anything short of death I can heal, eventually.

Healing was working overtime. Not to fix the damage, but to stem blood loss and make sure enough organs survived so that he could live a minute longer.

The fire still burned, carving an ever-bigger hole in the king’s chest. Until. Bingo.

A [Distortion Field] sphere appeared inside the king’s hollow chest as Michael retracted his hand, the space barely enough for it to manifest thanks to the fire turning wood to ash.

Then the king moved, trying to strike, heedless of the danger.

Its body made contact with the sphere. The force was transmitted, amplified, redistributed. The bark was strong when hit from the outside, but the king had never evolved—or been made—to resist hits coming from inside.

The king exploded. It was a tide of splinters, broken wood, moss and a sticky fluid that reeked of the most potent sap. It went everywhere.

But the thing that surprised Michael the most was the silence. Now that the king was no longer howling in pain and rage, now that the pieces of wood had all fallen to the floor, all that was left was deathly silence. This deep inside the trunk of a mighty tree, no sound reached from the outside.

And no sound should have reached the outside either.

He was safe. Slumping to the ground, he began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, adrenaline slowly fading as the pain made itself known, and even as he still laughed he began to heal itself, the bountiful mana of this floor allowing him to keep a steady trickle of healing going. The hunger hit him, and the laughing turned to coughing and then faded, leaving him deathly tired, mangled and broken.

He dragged himself to the other room, which he hoped was a kitchen, leaving a bloody trail behind. His eyes lit up when he saw the pantry, which he raided with gusto. He didn’t care that the food tasted like trees and plants. It was all calories, and he sorely needed them.

His body slowly mended itself over the next few hours. His bones set themselves straight, then healed. His pulverized hand merely tickled, and then was whole again. His torn flesh regrew, bubbling up from the wounds. He must have consumed hundreds, if not a thousand coins worth of mana in the many hours it took to heal, dragging all the mana he could to himself with sheer force of will, and of his skills.

Walking back towards the corpse of the king, he found that all the wood had dissolved into motes of mana. In its place, there were three things. A stack of coins, three of which shone a radiant silver, and were like a beacon to his mana sight. A skill stone. And another thing.

The glyph.

Gingerly, he extended a hand to touch the shining yellow set of lines, squiggly and straight and meeting at an angle, a design so complex it hurt the eyes. As soon as he touched it, it dissolved, vanishing. In its place, he felt a warmth spread through him. The sensation was fleeting, and soon even that was gone, replaced by a message.

His first thought was to leave. He had had enough.

But first. He inspected the coins. He couldn’t know for sure, but it felt like a silver coin was worth many of the copper ones, but not so many as to be thousands of them. A hundred, then. 100 Copper to make a Silver, makes sense.

Other than that, there were around thirty more copper coins waiting there. Fiddling with them, he found it easy enough to make the silver one turn into a hundred copper ones, and vice versa, using his mana manipulation. A grand total of 330 coins, not bad. Plus some more I spilled downstairs, when the orc dragged me to the fighting pit. Damn, that was traumatic, but was it really more traumatic than what I just did? Am I becoming desensitized to this?

The last thing left to examine was the skill stone.

This must be the ability the king used to force me to speak. Damn, this is a dangerous one. Do I really want to have such a tool in my arsenal?

The answer, which came quickly enough, was yes. A rare skill was a rare skill, and it was better to have it than refuse it and regret it later. He absorbed it, but with a vow to try and never use it for evil, unless strictly necessary. It was too slippery a slope.

I see. Simple suggestions are easy. I can make someone drop a cup of coffee, but if I try to make them spill the scalding coffee all over themselves, they will resist me much harder. Extreme mana cost? How much even is that?

On that regard, he also made a mental note to test how much mana he had, but that could wait until he was back to the material world. He knew he had grown, a lot, with all the healing and the fight. Which is good. I am so going to need every scrap I can get.